The Secretary of Homeland Security came down to the Arizona border this week. Markwayne Mullin visited the construction site where crews are building a second border wall, and KGUN 9 had the exclusive on the trip.

Good for him. I mean that without sarcasm, which is rare for me. A DHS Secretary standing on dirt where the wall is going up beats one sitting in a briefing room in Alexandria reading bullet points somebody else wrote. I've watched border policy get made by people who couldn't find Kinney County on a map if you spotted them San Antonio. Mullin walking the line in Arizona is the bare minimum, but the bare minimum has been a tall order for a while now.

The second wall construction is the part that matters. The first wall, where it exists, changed the traffic. It didn't stop it. Anybody who tells you a barrier alone stops smuggling is selling something. What a barrier does is funnel people into choke points where Border Patrol can actually catch them. No fence, no funnel. No funnel, and you get what we had for years: groups crossing wherever they felt like it, cutting fences, trashing water lines, running cattle to death on private ranchland. I've replaced enough wire and enough water trough to know the difference a wall makes.

A second wall means the first one worked well enough that somebody decided to double down. That's a decision made by people who looked at the data and saw where the traffic shifted after the first barrier went in. You build the second layer to close the gaps the first one created. It's ugly, concrete-and-steel logic, and it works.

Arizona's border country is rougher than what I deal with down in Kinney County in some ways. The terrain west of Nogales chews up vehicles and people both. Smugglers use it because the ground is hard to patrol, and the harder the ground, the more a physical barrier matters. A wall in flat sand is useful. A wall in those hills and arroyos is essential.

I don't know what Mullin saw on his tour or what he took away from it. The KGUN report didn't give much on his specific remarks, and I don't blame them. What matters is that he stood there. The next Secretary, and the one after that, needs to stand there too. Every one of them. Make them look at the cut fences, the trash, the boot trails. Make them stand in a wash at 110 degrees and listen to a rancher explain what a group of 40 crossers does to a water system designed for 30 head of cattle.

I've testified in Austin twice. Both times I told the people in the room the same thing: come look. Drive the fence line. Smell the discarded clothes and the broken plastic jugs. Then tell me how secure the border is. Mullin came and looked. Whether anything changes because of it, I'll believe when I see it on the ground. But the visit itself beats another press conference in Washington.

Crews are still out there pouring concrete and setting panels. That's the part I care about. Wall going up means somebody decided to do the work instead of talking about it. I've waited 30 years for that to be the default position instead of the exception.